...a photoBook is an autonomous art form, comparable with a piece of sculpture, a play or a film. The photographs lose their own photographic character as things 'in themselves' and become parts, translated into printing ink, of a dramatic event called a book...
- Dutch photography critic Ralph Prins

vrijdag 5 november 2010

The Iconic Moments of the 20th Century Photojournalism Photography

The series of photographs entitledThe Iconic Moments of the 20th Centuryemerged in the processual work with the pensioners in a home for the elderly in Glasgow emanates the same impression. A group of aged volunteers pose in their everyday outfits and in their daily environment (the vicinity of the Home) to re-enact the scenes from well-known newspaper photographs taken from history books and encyclopaedias. The images in question depict ‘historical moments’ that took place in their lifetime: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at the Yalta Conference during the World War II, the Napalm Attack and the killing a Vietcong from the Vietnam War, or the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, which was depicted live on a TV programme. Each of these images represents an immediately recognisable cultural leitmotif of its époque, the representation that overshadows the event it documents. Let us remember the unclothed nine-year old girl Kim Phuc, the subject of the photo Napalm Attack, which toured the world inciting numerous political controversies: the Canadian photographer who took the picture won the Pulitzer Prize; the girl became the star of numerous humanitarian events and anti-war campaigns and also the hero of a bestselling bookGirl in the Picture*.Jelena Velcic in Breaking Step—Displacement, Compasion and HUmour in Recent Art From Britain, Catalog, 2007 Belgrad

________________________________*Denise Chong,The Girl in the Picture: The Story of Kim Phuc. The Photograph, and the Vietnam War (London: Penguin Books, 2001)